draper

Old French drap meant a piece of cloth or fabric — particularly woolen cloth. The word came from Vulgar Latin *drappus, possibly of Germanic origin. The draper was the retailer of woolen cloth: he sold it by the yard, measured and cut from bolts. In medieval England, the draper was distinct from the mercer (luxury fabrics), the haberdasher (accessories), and the clothier (who made up the cloth into garments).

The Worshipful Company of Drapers of London was granted its first royal charter in 1364 and received its current charter from Henry VII in 1505. It is the third-ranked of the Great Twelve livery companies. The Drapers provided cloth for the royal household and regulated the wool and cloth trade — England's most important medieval industry. The wealth of medieval England ran on wool and cloth.

The verb 'drape' — to hang or arrange cloth — emerged from the draper's trade: to drape a garment was to hang it as a draper displayed it. 'Drapery' meant both a draper's goods and the arrangement of fabric in painting and sculpture. Renaissance painters devoted enormous study to drapery — Leonardo's drapery studies, Dürer's fabric studies — because skillfully rendered cloth signaled mastery.

H.G. Wells worked as a draper's apprentice at Southsea (1881–1883) before escaping to become a writer. His autobiographical novel Kipps (1905) describes the draper's trade with evident relief at having escaped it: the long hours, the servility required, the cramped existence above the shop. The draper who shaped Wells gave English one of its first science fiction writers.